Conscious and subconscious attitudes towards English Imports in the Nordic countries: Evidence for two levels of language ideology

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Abstract

The article reports on how the present-day influence from English is perceived and assessed in seven Nordic communities. The focus is on comparison, between the seven communities, and between two data sets obtained under different conditions of consciousness. The comparisons show that the populations reproduce the “purism level” of their own community’s official language policy in their consciously offered responses to questions in a telephone survey, while the purism–laissez-faire ranking of the communities is turned upside down in a subconsciously offered data set obtained in a speaker evaluation experiment based on the matched-guise technique. In the same way, analyses of how the evaluative reactions correlate with social-group divisions show reproduction and non-reproduction of the stereotypically expected correlations, in the conscious and subconscious conditions respectively.
Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Journal of the Sociology of Language
Issue number204
Pages (from-to)59–95
Number of pages37
ISSN0165-2516
Publication statusPublished - 2010

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